Evening Standard, January 1970
‘The money you get paid as a singer is all out of proportion. In America they pay you to sing – but they don’t pay the birds to sing in the trees. So it really is ridiculous. But I don’t want to give to charity just to appease my conscience. I really want to be sure to do some good with my money – although I do get pangs of conscience when I’m buying jewels and there are children starving in Biafra. Really I’d like to help with the balance of nature. It would be good to help clean up some river or something so the fish could live in it again. I really want to do my part to make the world get better. My music is how I like to help people: with my money I’d like to help the land.’
Joni Mitchell is a poet, a singer and a fervent anti-pollutionist – pollution being the most fashionable thing to be ‘anti’ at this moment. Perhaps that sounds more cynical than I intend it: but it does seem to be that, every few months or so, the whole of that section of society around which youth culture is modelled, takes up some new social evil or phenomenon, preaches platitudes to the converted, and then quickly forgets about it and moves on to something new.
I met Joni Mitchell this week and, when there was a lull in the conversation, she played me what she called a little bit of her Ecology Rock and Roll – a track from her new album where she sings a biting refrain that goes ‘We paved Paradise and put up a parking lot’. (Big Yellow Taxi)
‘That really happened,’ she says. ‘When I was in Hawaii, I arrived at the hotel at night and went straight to bed. When I woke up the next day, I looked out of the window and it was so beautiful, everything was so green and there were white birds flying around, and then I looked down and there was a great big parking lot. That’s what Americans do. They take the most beautiful parts of the continent and build hotels and put up posters and all of that and ruin it completely.’
Joni is twenty-six and responsible for writing what I reckon to be one of the most sensitive songs of the Sixties, Both Sides Now. She wrote it during the period of her marriage break-up three or four years ago, but it didn’t become generally well known until the Judy Collins recording was issued last year.
‘I was brought up in Alberta and while I was at college began singing in small night clubs. When I was twenty, I went back east to Toronto to try to sing for my living. I was working steadily until I met another folk singer from Detroit. We were married and went to live in Detroit, which is really a very decadent and internally decaying city – very unstimulating. And then my marriage was dissolved, mostly because of our separate careers.
‘It’s difficult to maintain a relationship when you’re married to your career, like I was to mine, and he was to his. We tried to work as a duo, but our ideas didn’t go together. We held each other back in our modes of expression by trying to compromise. I was divorced at twenty-two, but really I don’t want to talk about that.
‘My husband and I had an understanding about it, and the people who were most upset were my friends in Canada. In many ways Canada is more like England and they don’t accept divorce and separation as easily as they do in the States.
‘I don’t like talking about my life. It seems to me that when you may say at one time may be quite different from what you might say two weeks later. I hardly ever do interviews at all. I don’t care if I need them for my career or not. I remember when I was about fourteen I was going to a prom and having my hair dried at the hairdressers and they gave me a movie magazine to read. It was all about the marriage of Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin breaking up. And I thought “what a bummer it must be to have a life that is so public, to have people know so many things about you”. To read all those things doesn’t appeal to me personally, so I don’t like to contribute to that kind of reading.’
Her singing voice has a shrill, piercing untrained ring about it, but her imagery is acute and rich. ‘I think I’m both poet and singer,’ she says. ‘My words can stand up by themselves without being sung and I’m working on a book of poetry now which I hope to have finished by the summer.’
Two albums and a series of concert tours of the States have left her quite well off and she now owns a house in Laurel Canyo. But she feels her public life is so full that she has to short-change her friends. Her particular friends at the moment are the members of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young super-group and she’s knitted scarves for them all.
Sometimes she speaks with a bald naïveté which disarms. Her shyness bothers her because it means that she can’t feel as relaxed at parties as she’d like to, and she gets very nervous before going on stage, but she thinks too, it’s the reason for her gift. ‘My mind isn’t quick and sharp in certain ways. Not on social levels, anyway. And now because of my stature as an artist I tend to intimidate people, and then because of that they try to intimidate me.’
She was an only child and her creative interests were always encouraged. But at nine she spent half a year in hospital with polio (‘I had to learn to walk again’) and passed the time by singing to a captive audience of a little boy of six in the bed across the room. From then on she began to get more interested in writing.
The conversation lags and she makes for her immediate and automatic escape: would I like to hear some more music, she asks. I say I would, and this time I catch the phrase ‘Pull up the trees, put them in a tree museum, and charge the people a dollar and a half to see them.’
POSTSCRIPT: The ecology movement mushroomed overnight at the beginning of 1970 and I suspect I was being less than fair to Joni Mitchell in implying that she was jumping on to a fashionable bandwagon. She and I never really hit it off, due largely to the constant interruptions of her manager. Despite that, I became a very big fan and wrote my first novel to her accompaniment.
